Kip Ramey looked sadly at his monkey dish of apple betty. Poking at its capstone curlicue of whipped cream, he muttered, “Guess they don’t give ice cream anymore.”
“They” is the Dillard House, a Rabun County, Georgia icon that long ago would have had its number retired if the restaurant played ball instead of frying chicken, baking cornbread, and simmering black-eyed peas. In its heyday, which coincided roughly with the Space Race, the paragon of mountain cooking drew 3,000 diners a day with its family-style meals of homegrown meats and vegetables.
As the one-time executive editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in a 1996 column, “In the old days, newspaper folks invented out-of-town assignments to take them within range of the Dillard House, where Miss Carrie presided over a revolving table laden with country ham, corn on the cob, new potatoes, lima beans, yellow squash, iced tea, peach cobbler, and whatever else happened to be growing in the fields or hanging in the smokehouse.”
Despite Jim Minter’s nostalgic tone, the restaurant’s format and unbelievable crowds persisted well into the current century. Like many Southern dining institutions, though, the Dillard House struggled to rebound from the pandemic, a challenge exacerbated by the 2014 death of longtime leader John Dillard. Word got around that the kitchen was cutting corners.
“Do people feel like the food has changed?” I asked one of the women in Ramey’s party, which included a few fellow self-taught artists and another native of Dillard, home to 337 people. Billy Redden is best known for appearing to pick the banjo in “Deliverance,” filmed around the county when Redden was a boy.
“Well,” she answered. “It actually has.”
On that Saturday evening in early May, only three tables in the broadly windowed dining room were taken. Ramey couldn’t remember ever sitting down for supper at the Dillard House without waiting in line. But the meal made clear why the restaurant’s popularity has lately slipped: Everything tasted canned, defrosted, or overly sweet, including tough pork ribs glopped with sauce, and collard greens burdened with sugar. There wasn’t any ham.
Yet fans of The Dillard House see a path back to glory. At the end of May, an Atlanta development company took over operations, three months after the business’ sale for an undisclosed price was announced. Legacy Ventures representatives did not return multiple messages from The Food Section, but the firm’s founder David Marvin told The Clayton Tribune that his company plans to plow $20 million into renovations of the restaurant and adjacent hotel.
Furthermore, the paper reported that “the plan is to keep ‘Dillard’ in the name but incorporate farming and fresh vegetables into the restaurant experience.”
Agriculture has always been central to Dillard House, which was a farm long before it started courting tourists. Part of that promotional scheme was a family history stuffed with more stereotypical hillbilly elements than a “Hee Haw” prop closet: Travel writers dutifully repeated the legend that the Dillard clan traded a jug of apple brandy, a muzzle-loaded long rifle, $3, and a coonskin cap to members of the Cherokee Nation for their patch of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Carrie Edwards grew up in a log cabin on the other side of the North Carolina border, cooking for itinerant gold prospectors who bunked with her family. After Edwards married Arthur Dillard in 1910, she suggested they should take in boarders too. Their first client was a Methodist minister who was called by Carrie Dillard’s meals to extend his stay for several years.
The Dillards’ business boomed as the state and county invested in road improvements, with a standalone restaurant added to the property in 1953. “People said I was crazy to enlarge the place,” Carrie Dillard was quoted as saying. “Next summer on one Sunday we fed 4,197 people.”
Dillard House “is what kept Dillard alive,” Ramey said. By the 1970s, the hungry throngs were so immense that the Dillard family opened Dillard House Jr., a quick-service version of the iconic dining room on the hill.
But at its peak, the company’s most significant business venture was a 900-acre farm that straddled the state line. In 1971, when The Shreveport (Louisiana) Journal sent a reporter to check out the operation, six of those acres were sown in corn exclusively for the restaurant. The Dillards also raised Black Angus cattle and hogs, some of which would spend six months in the Dillards’ hamhouse before being served or sold.
Other Dillard House ingredients came from a garden just beyond the kitchen door. Carrie Dillard was renowned for charming guests into helping her pluck berries for shortcake, or shell beans to serve alongside hot yeast rolls and ardently vinegared relish.
Since the turn of the current century, nearby Clayton has almost fully eclipsed the tiny town of Dillard, which has been whittled down to a row of shuttered jumble stores and one quiet taqueria. Clayton, by contrast, looks like an extension of Atlanta’s toniest shopping districts, with plenty of restaurants flaunting their commitment to local sourcing. But at those places, a busy night entails dozens of customers, rather than thousands. It’s a thus-far unanswered question whether a Dillard House without an auxiliary full-fledged farm can return to its original ways in the face of rising food costs and a severe agricultural labor shortage.
In other words, climate change and immigration policy may determine whether the next iteration of Dillard House fries fresh or frozen okra.
Dillard House’s size may work in its favor. At least, that’s Matt Wallace’s read on the situation. Wallace, the chef-owner of Blacksheep in Beaufort, South Carolina, this spring put his restaurant on sabbatical, citing frustrations with the produce supply chain.
“I tend to squawk a lot when the food isn’t perfect, and I’m not exactly buying enough to pay someone’s salary, so dealing with me isn’t usually a point of high return,” he said of the many times he complained about a delivery of damaged vegetables. “Dillard House has the power to purchase entire harvests of tomatoes or beets or sweet potatoes.”
That’s increasingly possible in southern Appalachia because of the growth of food hubs, which aggregate, store, and distribute local food so growers don’t have to fuss with farmer’s markets, and restaurants don’t have to deal with countless producers. There are now four hubs in the vicinity of Dillard House, with more in the planning stages.
“My ability to grow is exponential,” Lisa McBride, founder of WNC Farm to Table in Sylva, said of demand for food hubs’ services.
Perhaps not quite exponential. According to McBride, North Carolina is second only to Texas in farm acreage lost to development. Still, she’s confident that Dillard House could secure the produce it needs to replicate the locally sourced feasts that until recently were daily occasions.
“I remember being very young the first time I went to Dillard House,” Wallace, the Blacksheep chef, said. “Tables were brimming with jams and jellies and pickles and apple butter, biscuits, fried chicken. My more recent visit a couple of Christmases ago at the request of my father was, unfortunately, kind of sad. The restaurant itself was just a shell and everything inside was just a shadow.”
Clearly, to those who care, the situation is in dire need of being sorted out soon. Headlines reflect what’s at stake: “Old Family Business Fighting for Survival,” one story warned. “Georgia Resort Feels Tension of Commerce, Old Ways Merging,” another explained.
The first story was published by UPI in 1978. The second appeared in the New York Times in 1983. Worrying about Dillard House’s fate has become as hallowed a tradition as its summertime blackberry cobbler, served with ice cream.
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